Over at CALIopolis, CALI Executive Director John Mayer has the end of semester survey results from the Legal Education Podcasting Project (LEPP). The project, conducted during the Winter/Spring 2006 semester, involved about 30 law professors who recorded their classroom lectures and/or created weekly audio summaries and disseminated the audio files via a podcast feed.

The surveys, completed by students enrolled in the affected classes, provide some interesting data. Despite the podcasting name (inspired by the Apple iPod), over three quarters of the participants used a personal computer to listen to the podcasts. Only a little over 16% used a portable MP3 player.

Perhaps most notably, there was no real indication that the availabilty of a class podcast resulted in more absences by students. 85.5% of students reported that they attended classes with podcasts as much or more often than their other classes.

I've been podcasting this summer for my online Advanced Legal Research class. The interesting thing about my experience is that the podcasts aren't a supplement to the classroom lecture. They ARE the classroom lecture. Most of my students probably don't even really know what podcasting is, but they seem to have embraced the format nonetheless. I recently posted a discussion question on the class blog soliciting suggestions for how law schools could improve legal research instruction. By and large, the responses seemed to indicate that an online research course was exactly what they wanted, both for its convenience and its reflection of an increasingly electronic dependent world.

And I'd say that bodes well for CALI's podcasting push. Mayer says plans are already under way for LEPP II.

Visit CALIopolis for more of Mayer's analysis of the survey results, or simply download the complete survey results in PDF format.